Guadeloupe, along with its sister island Martinique, is a French island lying between the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea in an archipelago known as the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Guadeloupe lies about 1,500 miles southeast of Miami and approximately 1,763 miles east of Honduras, Central America. The Caribbean Sea is to the West. The Atlantic Ocean is to the East. Dominica lies between Guadeloupe and Martinique, with less than 30 miles of ocean separating the islands. Les Saintes, Marie-Galante, and Le Désirade are less developed minor islands off Guadeloupe’s southern shore.

Guadeloupe is really two islands divided by a narrow channel, connected by a bridge, and totaling 560 square miles. The western island, Basse-Terre, is volcanic, with rainforests and waterfalls. The eastern island, Grande-Terre, gets less rain and features white-sand beaches. Marie-Galante, the largest of Guadeloupe’s outer islands, is an arid limestone and coral plateau divided into two parts by a deep chasm known as the Barre. Les Saintes are actually a cluster of mountaintops that jut out of the Caribbean off the southern tip of Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre. Only Terre-de-Haut and Terre-de-Bas are populated. La Désirade is a long, narrow slice of windblown land that stretches east off Guadeloupe’s Atlantic coast. It has a rocky northern shore and sandy southern beaches. Ile de la Petite Terre, a tiny islet between La Désirade and Marie-Galante, is arid, rugged, and uninhabited.

Guadeloupe boasts a tropical climate, remarkable scenery, and abundant sun, sea, and sand. While the independent English-speaking island of Dominica separates Guadeloupe from Martinique, distances are short, and it’s quite possible to combine Martinique and Guadeloupe into one vacation.

Because Guadeloupe is French, tourists get a two-for-one holiday. French pride and bon vivant chic temper the hot, wild, astonishing beauty of the tropics, creating a faux France in the Caribbean. Guadeloupe is an overseas région or département of France with democratic representation in the National Assembly in Paris.

French is the official language on Guadeloupe. All residents study French in school, and many also know English. Nevertheless, on the streets the locals often speak Créole, a hybrid language derived from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and various African dialects. Plantation slaves started the language, and it was once considered a bastardized version of French, but today it is gaining respect as the written and spoken language of the Caribbean.

Residents of Guadeloupe enjoy a marvelous quality of life, and visitors may feel as if they’re in a small town on the French continent. The corner boulangerie sells fresh-baked croissants, le jazz plays in the bistros, and haute cuisine is served to fashionably dressed patrons at upscale restaurants. The consequence is France-like prices, rush-hour traffic, and the usual cosmopolitan stresses.

Most of the million tourists who visit Guadeloupe each year are French, but the majority of residents on the island are black descendants of African slaves or mulattos with a mix of African and European ancestry. Still, white citizens, called békés, and white French citizens living on the island, called métros, control much of the economy and hold many administrative positions. As in France, literacy and life expectancy is high, infant mortality is low, and most residents consider themselves Catholics.

Guadeloupe is mountainous, with complex ecosystems. Tropical vegetation covers most areas, but in some places it’s tropical desert and in others it’s tropical rain forest. Several of the beaches have black volcanic rock; some are blanketed in fine golden or course gray sand, while others have soft, pure white sand. Spectacular volcanos, gorgeous waterfalls and miles of flat sugar plantations mingle with dense forests, arid scrub brush and marshy salt ponds.

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